Uncle Pen was a real person. Pendleton Vandiver played fiddle for square dances in Ohio County, Kentucky, and a boy named Bill Monroe stood beside him with a guitar. That job taught Monroe timing. About twenty years after his uncle died, Monroe put him in a song. The song has outlasted them both.
Where it came from
Bill Monroe was born September 13, 1911, in Rosine, Kentucky, the youngest of eight children. He was cross-eyed as a boy and left school at eleven, in part because of his poor eyesight. His older brothers Birch and Charlie had claimed the fiddle and the guitar, so Bill took the mandolin, the instrument nobody else wanted. His mother died when he was ten. His father died a few years after that, in 1928. By sixteen he had lost both parents.
He went to live with his mother’s brother, James Pendleton Vandiver. Everyone called him Uncle Pen. The two shared a small house on a hill outside Rosine. Vandiver had been crippled and made part of his living from music, and he played dances around the county. Monroe backed him and soaked up the tunes. Monroe called Vandiver the fellow he learned how to play from. What he took away was a repertoire and a sense of rhythm. Ohio County heritage records credit those dances with building Monroe’s timing.
Vandiver was born in Butler County, Kentucky, in 1869 and died June 22, 1932. He is buried in Rosine Cemetery. Monroe unveiled a monument at the grave on September 13, 1973, his own birthday.
Monroe cut the song at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel in Nashville on October 15, 1950. The band was Jimmy Martin on guitar, Rudy Lyle on banjo, Joel Price on bass, Red Taylor on fiddle, and Monroe on mandolin and lead vocal. Decca issued it as 46283 in December 1950.
Uncle Pen shows up in other corners of Monroe’s catalog. Jerusalem Ridge is a stretch of hills near Rosine where Vandiver played fiddle into the evening. Monroe wrote a fiddle tune with that name and first recorded it in March 1975. He also built a full album around his uncle’s music in 1972.
How it works
Three chords carry the song. In G that is G, C, and D, with a G7 used as a passing chord on the way to the chorus. In Nashville numbers the verse runs 1, 5, 1, then 1 with a seventh added. The chorus runs 4, 1, 5, 1. Many bands play it in A instead of G, and a capo at the second fret with G shapes puts you there.
The chords are the easy part. The arrangement has stops in it, and the timing catches people at jams. Fiddler Martin Gilmore points to the trick timing and the stops as the reason this one is harder than three chords suggest. Count through the stops before you take a break.
The song also names a fiddle tune, and the band quotes it. Monroe’s recording closes with a figure from Jenny Lynn. That tune has its own identity. It sits in A, it turns up in old-time and bluegrass sessions, and it gets taught as a standalone piece on fiddle and mandolin. Sources split on its origin. The Traditional Tune Archive credits Monroe as composer. Peghead Nation traces it back to Vandiver. The archive does settle one thing: the title has no connection to the nineteenth century singer Jenny Lind.
One note on rights. Bill Monroe died in 1996, so this song stays under copyright for decades. This page gives history, form, and chord numbers. It prints no lyrics, notation, or tab. For more pages built the same way, see the songbook.
Recordings worth hearing
Start with the 1950 Decca original. Red Taylor’s fiddle sets the tone, and Jimmy Martin’s guitar runs push the band from behind. Monroe came back to the material in 1972 with a Decca album titled Uncle Pen, eleven pieces he learned from Vandiver in the 1920s, recorded between March 1969 and January 1971. Monroe said he had kept about thirty of his uncle’s tunes in his head.
Other artists picked it up early. Porter Wagoner recorded it in 1956. Michael Nesmith cut a version in 1973, and Leon Russell released one that same year under the name Hank Wilson.
The version that widened the song’s reach came from Ricky Skaggs. It appeared on his 1983 Epic album Don’t Cheat in Our Hometown and went out as a single in June 1984. The label doubted a bluegrass record could sell to country radio. Skaggs pushed for it anyway. On October 13, 1984, it reached number one on the country chart and held the spot for a week, with thirteen weeks on the chart in all. A song about a dead Kentucky fiddler, with banjo and fiddle out front, topped country radio in the middle of the 1980s. Before that, only Flatt and Scruggs had done it with a bluegrass record, when The Ballad of Jed Clampett hit number one during a chart run that began December 8, 1962. Monroe returned the favor on screen and played a character named Uncle Pen in the 1985 Country Boy video.
Jam bands took it up too. Phish has played it more than 200 times. Billy Strings and his band have played it at least twenty-three times since 2018. In a circle it sits next to Blue Moon of Kentucky and the rest of the Monroe canon, and it rewards a banjo player who can hold time through the stops.
Sources
Biographical detail on Pendleton Vandiver comes from Wikipedia, the Find a Grave memorial, and the Ohio County, Kentucky heritage site. Monroe’s early years come from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Wikipedia. Session details for the October 15, 1950 recording come from Praguefrank’s Country Music Discographies and 3 Chords A Day, which also notes the closing quote of Jenny Lynn.
Tune background draws on the Traditional Tune Archive entries for Jerusalem Ridge and Jenny Lynn, plus Peghead Nation. The 1972 tribute album is described on Wikipedia. Notes on the stops come from Martin Gilmore’s jam standards list, and chord references from Pickers Guide. For the Skaggs single, the number one is confirmed by his official number ones list, Country Universe, and the Wikipedia song page, with Bluegrass Today on the Country Boy video and Wikipedia on the Flatt and Scruggs chart run.